Should Homelessness be Addressed Nationally or Globally?
Homelessness is a state where an individual lacks secure, safe, and suitable housing. When one visualizes homelessness, often an image of an old man begging on the street wearing raggedy clothing comes to mind. However, what is less commonly visualized is the broad range of people that are left homeless due to multiple reasons. For example, a young family may find themselves homeless due to the parents becoming unemployed and hence facing extreme financial hardship. There are three main categories of homelessness. People can be categorized as homeless if they are living on the streets. This is referred to as primary homelessness. Homeless individuals may also be moving between temporary shelters, such as friends’ and family’s homes, and emergency housing. This is called secondary homelessness. The third form of homelessness is labeled as Tertiary Homelessness. This is where an individual lives in private boarding houses without a bathroom or a place to call home.
I believe that the issue of homelessness should be addressed on a national level. Whereby, each country should address the issue individually. I hold this view due to several reasons. From even just my personal travel experiences around the globe, homelessness looks different in different nations. National policies should be in place and should vary in each country around the globe. There are three concepts that need to be addressed for a nation to successfully tackle rising homelessness rates.
The first concept supports the need to build a well-coordinated system that plans for potential outcomes. To expand on this, clear targets and goals need to be set that are specific to every nation’s own homelessness issues. Setting a clear goal, with a deadline that highlights areas that need attention and generates public will, motivating volunteers and political leaders will ensure that homelessness is addressed effectively. Reliable data that is collected nationally rather than globally can assist this. Whereby data offers a sense of scale, helping to demonstrate the impact of policy changes and aiding the case for allocating resources. By analyzing and seeing what is working to improve strategies, this shared data will eventually help nations gain real progress toward ending homelessness.
Secondly, each nation must also form specific effective solutions for prevention and accommodation. In other words, each nation should form its very own plans in regards to how they are going to combat homelessness as some nations may need to focus more on the prevention of homelessness whilst others may need to focus on building housing for those that are already homeless. For the formation of accommodation to be truly effective, programs should be coordinated across a national system, targeted to the right subpopulations, and organized toward reaching a measurable target. This would not be achievable if homelessness was addressed as a global issue.
Finally, nations must have the necessary policies and legal frameworks in place to offer resources and political will to enable a coordinated effort to combat homelessness. In some nations, there is criminalizing unavoidable behaviors of individuals experiencing homelessness without offering alternatives that can undermine solutions. These nations need to first address the decriminalization of such behaviors before attempting to prevent homelessness and house the homeless. Whereas other nations that do not have such laws need to progress by forming policies such as rent control which is designed to keep housing affordable and regulate the housing market. Consider China, where low-income families can apply for rent subsidies alongside rent-controlled public housing (Gurstein, Patten and Rao 2015). Such policies seek to protect tenants from sudden or unfair rent spikes that may cause them to lose their housing. Federal funding on a national level should also be used to support housing initiatives that are aligned with a national homelessness strategy.
It should be addressed that homelessness is an issue that exists in almost every country around the globe. Around 2% of the world’s population is homeless. This equates to roughly 154 million people living on the streets, in makeshift shelters, in refugee camps, and other transitionary and frequently dangerous situations. Hence, some may argue that homelessness is an issue that should be addressed globally as it is an issue that the majority of countries are facing. One common idea is that a global effort would add value would by providing the structure for homelessness prevention and solutions to take place by connecting cities to do it together. It was suggested at the conference on Homelessness: A Global Perspective, that there is increasing interest and participation of architecture schools around the globe in homelessness issues. This includes examining the role of design, urban planning, and architecture in constructing urban space and the immanent conflicts in contemporary urban settings regarding the use of public space by the homeless. Whilst this concept of global architectural planning urban spaces for homeless individuals to reside in is an interesting and somewhat valid concept it brings us back to the main issue of not being specific enough. Whereby, each nation faces different circumstances in regards to their homelessness situations. Hence the solutions and architectural planning needs to be individualized and personalized for each nation.
To conclude, homelessness is an issue that most countries around the world face and should be addressed nationally. This will allow for the individual needs and situation in each nation to be successfully addressed through the use of specific polices and solutions.
